This version is a little unusual for AYoS. While it’s built around acoustic guitar, there are a couple of voices (both mine), and the second guitar, instead of noodling around the melody as usual, tries to somewhat mirror the first (and it comes oddly close, considering what a sloppy guitarist I truly am… perhaps too close to do much good). I even threw in a little echo, a stab at otherworldliness that will no doubt just irritate some purists — but what are they doing listening to me, anyhow?

There’s a doomed beauty in knowing you’re about to make what you’ll probably look back on as the mistake of your life. Everything seems more real, more vivid, more 3D.

You look around as though it’s the last time you’re ever going to see familiar surroundings… and in a way, you’re right. Nothing will ever be the same, again.

And you know you have to do it, anyway.

I wrote this song as a kind of bluegrass thing but I turned it on its head, here, into a kind of swamp folk rock indulgence that I think exposes some other facets of the song, highlighting the youthful passion and lust for life and love. Which is not, actually, what I was thinking when I came up with the music for this version.

Instead, I’d been so annoyed with an attempt to do this song the previous night in a sensitive, finger-picked style that I decided, really, to just invert the style and approach. (The George Castanza Strategy. If everything you do turns out wrong, do the opposite.)

The version of Emily below borders on punk folk, at least in relation to how I normally play the song. This version is faster, edgier, looser… but it’s still fingerpicked, midtempo. The neofauvist angle is more in the abandon of the vocals (translation: once again I throw aside my first GF’s admonition that Effort is a sign of incomplete mastery.)

If you’ve ever made love in a hayloft — or tried — you probably realize that the reason such scenes are a fixture of certain romantic literature is that you have to be completely filled with a crazed, don’t give a damn passion to lay down in hay much less roll around in it.

But waking up in a hayloft the morning after puppy love turns serious during a sudden, summer storm… I’m thinking there might be a few delicious moments, there… or maybe bittersweet, if deep down you know you’re headed out of town as soon as you can get some travelling money together and hop a freight out to one of the coasts or maybe down to the gulf.

This song is about that moment, that very moment, when you know for certain just how much you’re about to throw away.